How Big Is It?

The Chicago Children's Museum proposes to build a new 100,000 square foot building beneath a northern section of Grant Park. The community is asked to believe that such a structure would have no significant impact on the park green and open space. How realistic is this claim?

Today, a large parking facility is built underground in this section of the park. While much greenery does remain above, there are also a number of structures on the surface, which provide for needs such as ventilation of the parking area. Few passersby would consider a ventilation duct attractive, but more importantly, these structures limit pathways and take up space that would otherwise be green. Since drivers park their cars and leave, today there are only a few people in the parking building at a time. An occupied building would call for excellent ventilation; what would the requirements for surface ducts or other structure be? The museum has stressed, in presentations and in its report "Standards of Excellence in Early Learning: A Model for the Chicago Children's Museum," its requirement for natural light. Permeating any large building with natural light is a design challenge, even more so an underground building, but it is difficult to imagine how this would be done without some significant above ground structure to open the building to sunlight.

Consider the size of the proposed new museum - one hundred thousand square feet. Two bedroom apartments in downtown Chicago are typically in the range of 800-1100 square feet each. The existing fieldhouse at Daley Bicentennial Plaza, built into a hillside at the northern edge of the park, is about 10,000 square feet. The current museum space at Navy Pier is 57,000 square feet. Most floors of the nearby 400 East Randolph Street condominium, which has the largest footprint of any building in the area, have 30 units ranging from 650-1100 square feet each - so 100,000 square feet is roughly equivalent to three full floors of a large high-rise building. Such a large occupied structure would certainly require considerable resources for light and ventilation, it is hard to believe that it could be built and function successfully without considerable impact to the park above.